by Lady Liberty
05/18/2003

Sad things happen every day. But there haven't been too many sadder things reported lately than the murder of young mother-to-be Laci Peterson. In the midst of all of the grief, it turns out the Peterson case is also providing a good deal of political fodder for the abortion debate.

The recovery of the bodies of Laci Peterson and her unborn son, Conner, have dominated the news recently. A woman's partially dismembered and decomposed body was found washed up on a California beach; a short distance away, the body of an infant boy, umbilical cord still attached, was discovered. Tests confirmed the identity of the corpses, and Laci's husband, Scott, has been arrested and charged with a double homicide.

Laci's devastated parents have appeared tearfully on television pleading for justice for their daughter and unborn grandson. Scott's parents also ask for justice, but they want it for their son who, they claim, was arrested in a rush by police who had made up their minds as to his guilt with little or no evidence to support their conclusions. As for Scott Peterson himself, he had been having an affair in the weeks prior to his wife's murder, and when he was picked up by police was seen to have dyed his hair and grown a goatee, and was carrying $10,000 in cash. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

However circumstance, opportunity, or motive might appear, Scott Peterson must be presumed innocent until such time as he's proven guilty in a court of law. Any arguments one way or the other will soon be centered in a courtroom where a jury will consider whether or not he's guilty of a double homicide. But it's that very charge - whether Peterson is found guilty or not - that could also end up in court.

In the state of California, a person found guilty of murder can be punished only with jail time. A double murder, though, makes a convicted criminal eligible for the death penalty. It was, at least in part, the desire to try Peterson for his life that led authorities to decide on the double homicide charge. (Interestingly, if Peterson were charged under federal statute, he could only be charged with a single murder. Federal law considers crimes committed only against the pregnant woman herself. Legislation is now being introduced (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030425-19169504.htm) in both the House and Senate to change that.)

Some women's groups reacted to the charge almost before the ink was dry on the arrest warrant. Because Laci's baby had not yet been born at the time of her death, these women believe any suspect should be charged with one murder and not two. They fear that classifying the death of an unborn child as a homicide confers personhood on a fetus and thus has serious repercussions where abortion is concerned. Although they have a point, their fears are unfortunately likely to prove groundless. After all, though California law specifically considers the intentional killing of a fetus to be murder, an exception is included in the law for surgical abortions.

There are already laws on the books in many states that pertain to the death of an unborn child. Each of those laws, regardless of what other words they include, as an "except for abortion" clause somewhere in the content. In some states, deliberately inducing miscarriage is a crime. Except, of course, for abortion which can actually be defined as the deliberate induction of a miscarriage. In some states, causing the death of a fetus by injuring its mother (such as in a drunk driving accident) will result in charges for killing the unborn child. Again, injuries to a fetus are exempted from criminal statues in the case of abortion.

In a Connecticut case (http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/05/07/fetus.ruling.ap/index.html) decided recently, the State Supreme Court upheld the assault conviction of a man who attempted to induce an abortion by slipping his girlfriend labor-inducing medication. Defense attorneys had argued that the fetus was his target and so he couldn't have assaulted the girlfriend. The justices unanimously ruled, however, that the fetus was a part of the woman much like "teeth, skin, and hair" all of which are eventually shed. Bizarrely, this decision didn't make either side of the abortion debate happy. Pro-life forces say that this "body part" can have a different blood type, and certainly has different DNA than the mother, so how can it be just another part of her? Abortion advocates didn't care for an addendum offered by one of the justices that said a fetus could be considered both a part of another's body and its own separate entity.

The entire crux of the abortion debate hinges on when a fetus is a life. And that's why the debate continues to be ongoing. There is a very fuzzy line that no one has been able to adequately define in a manner on which everyone agrees. For example, some religions believe that, without a soul, a fetus isn't human. Catholics and some others believe that fetuses are endowed with a soul at conception. The Bible says babies are given a soul with their first breath. Others think of a growing fetus as a baby as its features become more and more recognizable as such (though most of them don't know that recognizability comes quite early in a pregnancy).

Those who don't consider religious arguments typically think a fetus under the age of about three months or so is less than human. They're countered by those who say such fetuses have the undeniable potential to become human in a short amount of time (which, of course, opens the argument that all sperm are sacred because they, too, are potential humans, something which many Catholics also believe, but that's not a part and parcel of the argument today). Most people think that fetuses that have reached an age of viability - in other words, can survive independently of the mother - are human, a place into which Laci's 8-month fetus certainly fits. But with modern medicine making continuous progress, fetuses born as early as 5 and 6 months have survived and grown into healthy children. So that line, too, is rapidly becoming less defined.

The law, on the other hand, cannot be ambiguous. If it were, there would be too many exceptions to the rules and that would result in chaos in a relatively short order. That the Petersons could have terminated Laci's pregnancy legally and without repercussion on the one hand, and that California could consider the death of the fetus a homicide on the other is a dichotomy that represents a threat to the law itself as well as to those who think abortion isn't murder. Perhaps the first and best step in cleaning up the ethical and legal mess we've made is to straighten out such conundrums.

What abortion rights advocates likely fear the most right now is the overwhelming public consensus that Scott Peterson should be charged with a double homicide. The memorial service held for Laci Peterson on May 4 was for her and her son, not for her alone, and large numbers of people grieved for both of the dead. The line has now clearly been moved back from birth to 8 months. That's a start.

Lady Liberty
March 11, 2003